The Corsaires’ defense tightens up against the Meteores and wins the game by two touchdowns. The author is in the center, wearing #50.

I’d only been in Paris for a couple of weeks last September when I started feeling the lonely sting of an expat with no connections to the local culture and a tenuous grasp of the language. By then, I’d seen the Louvre, strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens and sat in cafés eating steak frites and drinking carafes of wine.

The weak dollar threatened to put a premature end to my bohemian lifestyle. I canvassed the Left Bank on foot, gazing into the Café Select (where a destitute Hemingway still found enough money to drink every night of the week in the 1920s), and marveling at Les Deux Magots (where an anguished Sartre spent the German Occupation hashing out existentialism). Both places were now overpriced tourist traps patrolled by surly waiters. Running out of money and feeling slightly disillusioned with life in Paris, I resolved to make a change.

I wanted to meet actual Parisians and practice my French. So, when one day, while sitting on a park bench eating an overly salty egg and cheese crêpe, I came across an ad in an English-language magazine that read: “You wanna play some ball? Contact Cyril of the Corsaires,” I acted.

I wasn’t sure what kind of “ball” was being advertised, and just hoped it wasn’t soccer, since I was slow, uncoordinated, and past my athletic prime.

“We play American football,” Cyril told me in English, with a heavy French accent. “With helmets and pads and tackling, you know?”

Cyril, a brawny 30-something with a receding hairline, was the president of the Évry Corsaires, a semi-professional football team in Paris. He picked me up at a Métro stop on the Périphérique, where Paris officially ends and the dreary suburbs begin. We drove out to Évry, one of the grittier outlying suburbs populated mostly by North African immigrants, to play flag football on a Friday evening. Flag was just for fun, Cyril said. The Corsaires’ real game was full-speed, bone-crunching football américain.

“Oh, that’s serious,” I said.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“I grew up in Oklahoma,” I replied. “The heart of football country, in other words.”

“Sure, yes, but my favorite team is zee Packers, from Green Bay. I’m sure you can play with us. Offense and defense, maybe.”

Cyril went on to explain that France supports a fledging network of approximately 16 semi-pro teams that compete each year for the “Casque d’Or,” or Golden Helmet. The Corsaires played in the second division of the Fédération Française de Football Américain (F.F.F.A.), but could move up to the first division if they won the title that year. If this happened, teams from N.F.L. Europe would start offering Corsaire players professional contracts. To this end, the team had recruited Xavier, a back-up quarterback from the French national team, and Cyril was scouting American talent.

Teams in the French leagues are organized as private clubs that function as community centers, like the Rotary Club or Lions’ Club. The players, ranging in age from 18 to 45, do charity work and put on local exhibitions demonstrating the complex rules of the game to skeptical onlookers, often immigrants from Algeria or Senegal. Some clubs even pay players and coaches, and have cheerleaders and private sponsors. Still, the whole thing seemed quaint and innocent, like a 1950’s-Beaver Cleaver version of football, light years away from the sex, drugs and sleaze of the sport’s current U.S. incarnation. Players in France wear letterman jackets emblazoned with their positions and nicknames — “Warrior” or “Screwdriver” or “The Cramp.”

The first time I suited up for a Corsaires practice last September, I was overcome with emotion. Jogging around the field in full pads was, for me, the equivalent of Proust’s madeleine: suppressed memories from my Oklahoma youth came rushing over me. The smell of freshly cut grass, musty shoulder pads, and the first hints of autumn weather sent me into a reverie.

“Knock that man’s dick in the dirt!”

Until I was 14, my only goal in life was to play football for as long as it was physically possible. For me — as for most of my friends — this meant (ideally) high school and college ball in Oklahoma and pro ball with the Dallas Cowboys or Houston Oilers. I matured early and by eighth grade was a relatively bulky six-foot-tall starting middle linebacker. (I haven’t grown since.) By age 13, I was being recruited to play for a small Catholic high school and was told that I might even have a shot at a Division I scholarship for college. All of this, of course, depended on my dedication to football.

At this young age, football was life — not only for me, but for most of the adults in the community. The Oklahoma oil patch had gone bust in 1986, the local economy was in tatters, but these were the glory years of Barry Switzer, the legendary coach of the Oklahoma Sooners. In a dead-end town on the Bible Belt at the end of the Cold War, high school football provided a reason for hope, and everyone wanted to be a part of it.

My junior high team, the Edison Eagles, for example, supported a phalanx of unpaid assistant coaches who ran us into the ground twice a day during August: one practice at 7:30 a.m., followed by another after school. The coaches pushed us until someone vomited or suffered heat exhaustion. Water and bathroom breaks occurred rarely — usually only once a practice. If someone didn’t sacrifice his barely pubescent body on a tackle, one of the coaches would be in his face immediately.

“Knock that man’s dick in the dirt!” Coach Carl liked to scream, making the adolescent boys blush.

Kids — even academically successful ones — were encouraged to repeat eighth grade to gain an extra year of “maturity” before moving on to high school ball, where the stakes were even higher. Despite it all, I loved the game.

It was only at the Catholic high school’s varsity level that things went too far. Priests visited the locker room to bless our team before games, and to assure us that we were morally — and physically — superior to our opponents. At the same time, the starting linebacker and fullback terrorized the younger players with frat-like pranks usually involving threats of anal penetration. All of this was tolerated, and even encouraged by school authorities, as a rite of passage. The hypocrisy, the stupidity, the homophobia — it was all too much for me and I quit halfway through my sophomore year.

I put all this history aside for my season in the French leagues. At that first practice in Évry, Cyril put me in the end zone to return a kickoff. I felt a surge of adrenaline as I waited near the goal line for the whistle. Suddenly, I saw the pigskin hanging in the air above my head, secured it in my hands and sprinted up-field, breaking arm tackles and jogging triumphantly the last 20 yards into the opposite end zone. And this was just the first practice!  

As I trotted those last few yards, I imagined my redemption as a football player in this foreign land. “You will be a good linebacker,” Cyril had said prophetically. “And you will be called ‘Mad Dog.’”

Who needed a state championship in Oklahoma when I could have a Golden Helmet in France? I thought about the letterman’s jacket I never had in high school, with the words “chien fou” stitched across the breast.

The author with a broken left finger after a game in Chateauroux, France.

For the team

Practices started in early autumn — a glorious time in Paris — and we were expected to report every Tuesday and Thursday from 8:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. for the next five months. My initial feelings of imminent redemption gave way to confusion as the defensive coordinator, Jean-Pierre, gave me a weighty playbook to memorize. It had blitz packages and coverage schemes, audibles, zone and man defenses.

“You will play my way, or you won’t play at all,” he told me. “And you must learn it in French.”

The physical training proved difficult as well. There was no weight room, so we used random objects — and each other — to increase strength. My legs buckled as I tried to squat Arnaud, a 200-pound running back, on my shoulders. We had orange cones for agility drills, but I tripped over them. We had sleds for blocking and tackling practice, but I couldn’t move them. My helmet never fit properly and gave me headaches. I had to relearn how to tackle with my head up, lest I spear someone and break my neck. When I tried to cover wide receivers in man-to-man defense, another linebacker joked that I ran like a crab. The name stuck, and for a while I wasn’t “chien fou” but “le crabe.”

The weather turned cold and rainy around the end of October and I routinely left the practice field feeling cold, sore and exhausted. On these evenings, I usually headed to the team bar next to the practice field where the team ate olives and cheese, accompanied by wine and beer. When our de facto cheerleaders — the wives, sisters and girlfriends of my teammates — showed up, someone would put on Barry White’s greatest hits, and the bar would go crazy as people danced around our dirty clubhouse. Sometimes a player would bring a videotape of a recent N.F.L. game, and it always seemed so foreign, like watching a game of cricket in Texas.

I told some of the players that this whole routine was unique, very French.

“In the States, football is a spectator sport, a passive leisure activity, or an excuse for beer and BBQ,” I explained.

“You mean you would not put on the pads and play in your own leagues?” a linebacker called Dub asked me.

“Of course not,” I said. There would be fights, injuries, lawsuits, hurt feelings. It would be anarchy and bloodshed. We leave the game to the professionals.

“In France, we are the professionals,” someone else chimed in.

Each football team in the F.F.F.A. is allowed only three American players, and taxes of about $300 per player are levied on teams that employ American ringers. Many of these are former college players not skilled enough to make it professionally in the States or N.F.L. Europe, but still starved for the game they grew up on. Some are paid, but most do it for the love of football. Some come from major university programs, where the game is big business; others have never even played before.

The only other American on my team had never played a down of football in the United States but was now the star receiver on the Corsaires. In fact, Daniel didn’t even follow the game back home. One day, on the commuter train out to practice, I tried to engage him in a discussion about the N.F.L., but he only shrugged his shoulders.

“I follow soccer here,” he said. “I didn’t even watch the Super Bowl this year.”

I asked him why he played such a dangerous sport that he didn’t even follow. “You can be a star in France,” he replied. “In the States, you’d be nobody. So why not?”

The rest of the players came from every imaginable socio-economic and ethnic background. There were immigrants from West Africa, Vietnam, and Algeria. There were poor guys from the neighborhood who’d started playing out of curiosity. There were well-to-do French white guys who had studied at elite universities in the States and had picked up a passion for football there.

Then there were guys like Buko, who looked imposing and burly, like an American football player should look. He stood about 6’3’’, ran like a gazelle, and wore shiny blue leggings in lieu of socks. Buko spoke perfect black English without ever having set foot in an English-speaking country.

One day I asked him how he spoke English so well.

“I watch a lot of movies and shit,” he said. One of his favorites was the feel-good Disney picture, Remember the Titans.

In the film, Denzel Washington plays an African American coach for a football team in the South. The team has just been integrated and the racial strife that plagues the region is magnified among the individual players. Eventually, Coach Denzel brings everyone together and the integrated team wins a state championship. It is a happy ending that stresses team solidarity above individual difference, equality of opportunity above birthright. These are the values, incidentally, of the French Republic: Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité.

French football, much more than its American counterpart, seemed to embody these Enlightenment values. Despite the ethnic and class differences on the team, everyone seemed to get along.

Buko was the spiritual leader, and I couldn’t help but get emotional when he led a team chant that he had lifted from Remember the Titans:  “Everywhere we go/ People want to know/ Who we are/ So well tell them …We are the Corsaires/ The mighty mighty Corsaires!”

We chanted this as we jogged around the field before our first game, intimidating our opponent, Les Templiers, from another Paris suburb.

It worked — we won the game by two touchdowns. Our quarterback, Xavier, threw pinpoint strikes to Buko, the tight end, and Daniel, the wide receiver. They ran over the diminutive cornerbacks and safeties, guys who had plenty of speed but no knowledge of tackling. Our running back, a 34-year-old bald guy with no neck, and thighs like tree trunks, dragged their linebackers 10, 15 yards a carry and steamrolled their defensive backs.

Our defense wasn’t such an unstoppable force. The defensive backs didn’t seem to understand the concept of pass interference, and allowed the other team to move up and down the field on penalties. As a linebacker, my first assignment was to stop the run game, and this proved frustrating. I could see plays develop in the backfield, but just as I was about to tackle the running back, I found myself knocked backward by an offensive lineman. My highlight came when, dropping back into zone coverage on a pass, I deflected a pass to the tight end. Jean-Pierre, the defensive coordinator was livid and pulled me out of the game.

“On 53 punch, you are supposed to blitz the QB. Like I said — if you don’t respect my play-calling, you don’t play at all!”

A crowd of about 100 spectators braved the miserable rain to watch the Corsaires destroy the Templeriers on their home turf. For the most part, the spectators looked confused or disinterested, and even some of our own players had trouble deciphering the penalties. I explained to a second-string tackle that the team kicking the ball off can recover it only after it travels 10 yards. I watched the line judges consistently forget to change the down marker and move the chains. No one seemed too excited about anything. As a football fan, the experience was maddening.

When too much Fraternité is a bad thing

As autumn gave way to winter and our gridiron turned into a mud pit, the practices became miserable, boot-camp-like affairs. The dreary month of December brought a cold, steady rain to Paris and I began to realize that I was hopelessly undersized to play defense. The low point came shortly before Christmas, when an offensive tackle named Bob knocked me to the ground and then sat on me in the chilly mud.

In addition to my on-the-field frustrations, off-the-field festivities became increasingly ugly. The problem on the Corsaires, as it turned out, was not Liberty or Equality, but Fraternity.

Quite literally, this was fraternity of the Animal House variety, even though most of the players were well into their 30s, many players supporting families. They were grown men with responsibilities and serious jobs, not the kind of people you would imagine behaving like frat boys at a keg party. Some of them were intellectuals, capable of passing time on long bus rides by discussing world affairs; perhaps that’s why their dissolution into American-style meatheads surprised me.

Things came to a head the day that the starting quarterback, Xavier, lectured me about the fragility of the world’s oil supply.

“I don’t understand how you Americans can drive these huge cars, these SUV things,” he said. “Do you know that if you continue to consume oil at the current rate, the world’s supply will run out in twenty years? How can you, in good conscience, drive a car like that?”

I was stumped. This was not the kind of post-game talk I expected to hear.

“You know, it’s not that the French hate Americans,” he continued. “It’s this Manichean, dualistic view of the world your president has.”

By this time, Xavier was turned around and addressing the whole bus. A journalist from a Parisian daily was riding with us, and watched the Americans’ response closely.

I tried to be conscientious, I said. I rode my bike whenever possible. I recycled (sort of).
I recognized that the world wasn’t divided into good and evil, or black and white. I felt I had to say something conciliatory, something diplomatic to make up for all the bad blood caused by the Bush administration.  

Just then, a chant came up from the back of the bus. “Xavier! Xavier!” the crowd intoned.
The unsuspecting quarterback was being dragged to the back of the bus where a group of the largest Frenchmen I have ever seen waited for him. Whatever was happening didn’t look like the logical continuation of our discussion of American foreign policy.

A veteran lineman explained: “It is the bizoutage that all new players — including yourself — get when you join the Corsaires.”

Daniel translated for me: bizoutage meant hazing.

The back of the bus erupted in laughter as Xavier screamed, “No! Not the tape!” The ritual involved a lot of Ben Gay in the groin area and athletic tape below the belt. A hirsute man, the quarterback cried out in pain. So much for the pacifistic French you hear about on The O’Reilly Factor: these guys were sadists!

But the mob couldn’t be quelled by just one hazing. “The American! The American!” the crowd began to chant. I recalled my final decision to quit high school football after a frighteningly similar scene.

“Uh, I’m injured,” I said. “I can’t because of my finger. You see, it’s broken. I need ice and rest. Please. I’ll let you guys do the bizoutage next week.”

Part of my plea was true. I had actually broken my finger in the game, despite my limited playing time. At the middle joint, the finger bent into a bizarre 45-degree angle. It was red and purple and swollen. The next part, however, was a lie:  there would be no next week for me. My football career was over, again.

I found myself in the Luxembourg Gardens a few weeks later, noticing the meticulous attention that the groundskeepers paid to every sculpture, every plant, every tree, even in the dead of winter. No one dared to step on the grass that the gardeners in their lime-green suits had dutifully maintained. This part of Paris felt a world away from Évry and the Corsaires. It was quiet and civilized.

Some things, I decided, were best left to the professionals.

STORY INDEX

BOOKS >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

TOPICS > CLASSIC FOOTBALL LITERATURE

Friday Night Lights
by H.G. Bissinger
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0306809907

Paper Lion
by George Plimpton
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1592280153

North Dallas Forty
by Peter Gent
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1894963024

TOPICS> AMERICANS IN PARIS

Paris to the Moon
by Adam Gopnik
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0375758232

A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=068482499x

Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0802131786

“

Russell Cobb